THE POLITICAL SYSTEM OF THE BEMBA TRIBE-NORTH-EASTERN RHODESIA
By AUDREY I. RICHARDS 7. Bantu Political Organization — Some General Features
political systems of most of the Bantu peoples known to JL us show certain striking similarities, particularly as far as South and Central Africa are concerned. We are apparently dealing in each case with a tribal organization that is an outgrowth of a smaller lineage group, either split off from a parent stem in search of independence and new territory, or scattered by the onslaught of an enemy. In South, Central, and to a lesser extent East Africa most of the ethnic groups now known as tribes have a surprisingly short history of occupation of their present habitat — rarely more than 200 years and sometimes as little as 50 to 100. For this reason the original kinship structure of the immigrant people can still be recognized as the framework of their political system. Authority is almost invariably based on descent, whether within the family, the village, the district, or the nation, and the chief of the tribe combines executive, ritual, and judicial functions according to the pattern of leadership in each constituent kinship unit. Like the family head, he is a priest of an ancestral cult, believed in many cases to have a mystic power over the land, and he invariably claims rights over his people's labour and produce. The hierarchy of Bantu society allows only one type of authority, one basis of power, and one set of attributes in its leaders in most of the tribes so far described.
Besides this personal relationship established by tradition between the Bantu subject and his chief, yet another feature of the political organization depends on facts of kinship, emotional, legal, and ritual. Political power and prerogatives tend to become concentrated in the hands of descendants of the original lineage group, of which the chief is the living representative, and in many areas tribal cohesion seems very largely to depend on the predominance of this ruling line, whether the latter is to be reckoned as the first Bantu people to occupy the particular territory, or whether it conquered the earlier inhabitants and subsequently